Too much dissembling from the liberals and the mullahs has distorted international solidarity around the women's liberation struggle against the semi-feudal Islamicist regime of Iran. In the still boiling atmosphere around the anti-Islamic cartoons, the call by Campaign for the Abolition of All Misogynist, Gender-Based Legislation & Islamic Punaitive Laws in Iran to stage a continental, mulit-national march throughout Europe is right on time.
This campaign has united a core group of hundreds of Iranian and international women activists and personalities who have long been fighting for women’s rights, including some who have spent many years in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic. More than a hundred women and men fighting for women’s rights in Europe and elsewhere in the world have signed the call. Iranian women’s groups and individual activists, academicians and artists in exile, among them the 8 March Women’s Organization (Iran-Afghanistan), have been the backbone of this effort. So far it has been able to unite a broad array of Iranian opposition movement in exile, from communist and labor movement activists to progressive democrats.
For the last 27 years these Islamic laws have deprived women of their most basic rights as human beings and intensified the marginalization of women, creating a gender segregation that has made society a hell for all and forcing many women into suicide, prostitution, and drug addiction. Women are setting fire to themselves in increasing numbers. These laws represent and impose a state of semi-slave social relations on women. They have strengthened the already brutal patriarchal and male supremacist relations in the country. A vast apparatus of morality police has been set up to keep an eye on women and punish them if they violate these medieval moral codes of conduct. This is the dark ages in the 21st century.
Read the entire call: European March for Women's Liberation in Iran
Also see Doug Ireland's reporting on the wave of anti-gay persecution the Iranian mullahs seem to enjoy much like their American counter-parts: Kidnapped: Another Gay Iranian Torture Victim Speaks
do you know of any analysis of Iran which shows how Iranian society is semi-feudal? I'm genuinely interested - I've never really thought about it before.
Posted by: interested | February 17, 2006 at 02:41 AM